Creative Class

Design festivals are not only popping up, but growing fast, all over the world. Jude Stewart writes in Business Week about festivals from London to Belgrade and their effect on business, the design industry and community: 

Full Article: All the World’s a Fair, "Are design fairs really effective in drumming up business, boosting education, and promoting awareness of tomorrow’s next design capitals?"

Two favorite excerpts:

Everyone, into the kitchen:

John Lippinkhof, general manager of Design Platform Eindhoven,
organizers of Dutch Design Week every October. "It’s not a commercial
event. We ask designers to think about the design process… [and] the
public gets invited into the kitchen." This self-organized event grew
from a designers-only klatch 10 years ago to a weeklong public event in
2003, to 50,000 mostly Dutch participants in 2006, split equally among
designers, the public, and industry groups like manufacturers and
distributors.
 

Design = Hope in Belgrade?

By starting (and self-funding) a design fair, these designers hope to
motivate manufacturers, expose young designers to design greats,
promote design to policy wonks as an economic driver to develop
consumers, elevate designers’ incomes, and establish Serbia as a
regional hub for graphic arts. It’s exhilarating to think a design fair
could push forward such an agenda.

"After Design Week, [manufacturers and printers realized] that design
was… something to help their businesses," Vidakovic notes. "Before,
there was no sense that hiring someone creative should have value."

"We’ve lived in isolation for so many years," Vidakovic continues.
"Young people who are now 20, 22, the best years when you put on a
backpack and travel—they’ve never left the country. It’s probably hard
to understand from New York, where everything’s happening in front of
you, [but] every single professional they can see in the flesh, talk
to, get contact information from, start internships—it’s heartbreaking.
It’s a matter of life or death for these kids."

London Design Festival
Belgrade Design Week

In addition to design festivals, we’re seeing more and more design competitions. Through our work with the City of El Paso, TX we’ve been proud to support the El
Paso-Ciudad Juarez Binational Arts
& Cultural District Design Competition. Projects like this open doors for building on, investing in and engaging with the best and most authentic parts of place.

Posted by Amanda

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 9:45 am and is filed under Cities, Creative Class, Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.